


Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont (On Their Way to the Horizon)

by finch (afinch)



Category: 99 Red Balloons (Song)
Genre: Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:02:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afinch/pseuds/finch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quirky apocalypse. Need I say more?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont (On Their Way to the Horizon)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Annariel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annariel/gifts).



I was a speck in Ma's womb when the bombs fell. She and Mom had set off 99 balloons the day before, knowing it was the eve of war. That's how she tells it anyway, that they were young and stupid and thought they had nothing to lose. She and Mom talk a lot about having nothing to lose back then. I guess I don't really know what they might mean, there's a lot left to lose now.

I should back up, and start with where it all began, of the bombs and all that. Ma says if they hadn't bombed Dresden, this never would have happened. Now, I'm a pretty smart guy. I've gone and looked at the old maps, of how the world used to be, and I can't find a Dresden anywhere. Ma's old now, I can't really tell her that she's too old and getting senile, she'd have my head. Mom says she and Ma met 'sometime after that [Dresden] nonsense, but just before this nonsense happened'. It's okay, I think she's going senile too. Her, I could call her senile and she'd just laugh at me and call me baby boy and imply that I know absolutely nothing.

They were married before the first wave of the bombs, back when they still had Universities. They said their school colours were red and white, that they released red balloons at the graduation ceremony (I've never graduated, I have no idea what this could mean, but it's something about what happens when you leave a schooling institution. If you can make sense of better than me, all the power to you. I just know about graduated colours and the like). I think that's where they got attached to red, but Mom says it's a bit more complex than that, and the red is for the lost souls. I don't know what a soul is, and she's long since given up trying to explain it to me. She and Ma are soulmates I guess, and they were able to get married (I know, married, a fancy term, not just 'signing the documents.' It's weird). Mom says it's a bit like Jonah and Gabe now, and I asked her to explain, but she loses me at book. Ma's a little better at explaining, words written down, on this stuff called paper. Not real stuff, either. Stories and make-pretend and the like.

Ma says she doesn't know how I manage my red balloons every year and never manage to get caught. Every year, on the anniversary of the bombs, I release 99 red balloons. For them, for everyone who died, for me, for my daughter, for humanity. I started five years ago, and since then, several others have joined me, our own little treason against the regime, letting colour back into the grey and drab world. A sky filled with balloons, a sky full of laughter, a sky full of hope. Ma says she'll do everything she can to make sure I have enough red balloons to last a lifetime.

You have to believe in hope.

It's odd, how it works, nowadays. You get more babies if you're in a relationship and sign the forms with someone, but I wasn't when I got my little girl. There's no opt-out either, if you're the father, you get a baby and that's it, she's yours to raise; there are some standards, obviously the degenerates and feeble-minded don't get babies of their own, but I'm just an average Joe, so there she was, my little daughter. The mothers, if you don't sign the forms, can stay with you and the child, or not. She chose not to stay.

They don't break up the old family units either, so Mom and Ma are still together, though it's a hike to go see them. Money's different too, you can't just walk down to the store with paper money (I don't know what that even is) and get a pack of balloons. Ma said they tried bartering, and when that didn't work, they started assigning new money. I just know what's worth anything isn't money, Ma's got some gold and stones saved up, and we used them in emergencies when I was a kid.

People like to think I had it bad growing up, and I suppose if you remember the old ways before the bombs fell, you do too. I really didn't, I was too young to remember the immediate fallout and the going to the shelters, and, as Mom says, the erasure of colour from the world. All but the red balloons. Ma says it's ironic how much we became what we were trying so hard to avoid, and then she talks about a fat man and his little boy, but she always says things so vaguely, so thinly, and I can't get anything out of her. I understand, of course. It's treasonous to talk about the old ways; Dresden's not a map, and I don't know who these two people were, but they were clearly very important to Ma and the shape of society as we know it.

She's the one who took me out for the balloons the first time, when I was about five; she was giggling nervously, always checking over her shoulders as we let them go and ran the opposite direction as fast as we could, to get home to Mom, who rolled her eyes, but said she'd tell anyone who asked that we'd been there the whole time. No-one came to ask, but just as well, even if you don't do anything, a visit's enough to ruin all your chances. I had a lot of chances growing up, Mom made sure to that. Ma might be the more whimsical, lost-iin-thought one, but Mom's the one with her wits and sense about her.

Red balloons - red anything, came to mean something special to me, they were the only idea of hope in this world, even though, like I said, I really didn't have it bad at all. I had a few mishaps here and there, but I got my education, I went to the job they assigned me, I took my daughter like was decreed, I went to the house they gave me. But there's something about the look on Mom and Ma's face when they even hear about the red balloons. For Mom, I think the red balloons symbolise a loss, not an idea of hope. They released them on the eve of the end of the world, that's got to be tough to live with.

I wish she - and Ma - could tell me more of the stories about what it was like growing up for them. All Mom will say is that at one point in my history, it wasn't okay for her and Ma to be married, which is absurd. I can't even imagine not letting two people fill out the dedication forms given that they've taken the classes and the government has marked them green.

Which, ironically enough, you don't want to be marked yellow, that means you get no choice of jobs and you can't have kids, and if you're marked red, you get sent to the work camps; everyone knows those who go to the work camps don't ever come back. Maybe red wasn't the best colour choice, but it was the one they had at the time, and I doubt Ma and Mom knew what they were getting into when they released them, or what the government would do once all the bombs had finished fallen.

The way I learned it, I'm surprised I survived as well as I did, all intact and the like. Many of the other boys and girls didn't, and were put down. Even today, anyone born not-right is immediately put down- we can't repopulate the Earth with them getting in the way. Only those women with green cards can even have a child - and only those men with green cards will be given a child to care for. It's not so bad. I think Mom and Ma think it's horrible, but I think it's a pretty decent way to run a society. They say in this society, had they signed the forms, they couldn't have had more children of their own, at least not together. I suppose they're right, but it evens out with the two men couples being allowed to raise children.

Back to having to believe in hope …

Red anything, like I was saying, seems to be a symbol of the resistance. Not that there's much of a resistance. It's hard to have anything that isn't your special uniform. There's no numbers or anything like that, you're just assigned to a unit, and then a house in the unit, and that's on your uniform. My daughter and I are Lawnsdale 22 and Ma and Mom are Wizengamot 12. I don't know what either of those things are. They told us they used made up names for the units, and I believe them. There's about 50-100 families a unit, and we're all pretty close to each other. Close enough to know when something is wrong with the other.

The guy down the street was hauled in on treason charges, they wound up reassigning his two children. I don't know what he did to be so treasonous, but that's neither here nor there - the point is, I can't go wear a red badge or anything and declare my want of -

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? I don't know what I want to declare my want of. I don't know what there is to want - except the old way, and clearly the old way wasn't perfect if it resulting in all the bombs falling and the world ending. So the balloons will just have to be hope for now.

I wonder all the time where they end up, we've never had any downed balloons wind up near us, though Ma and Mom, living farther out, have seen them chased down by the officials. No-one asks questions about stuff like that, and no-one would volunteer the information if a red balloon did wind up across their path. I just know it must be working because the skies fill with them, and I don't think we're the only enclave to do it. Ma says you must be able to see them from the other enclaves, but she hasn't seen any balloons from them. She would know.

I sometimes worry they'll just call us a problem enclave and eradicate us all - they do that sometimes, if there's too much civil unrest, but for now, they seem content. I think that maybe the red balloons are hope for them as well, that they don't want to do this either - I'm glad I didn't get assigned military, but then, I don't have the tempernment for it, I guess. That, or government, but let's be honest, they're about the same thing. I got to stay in this enclave, with my parents, and have a daughter. That's more than I think most government and military employees get.

So for now, I'll keep going out, on the anniversary of war, and releasing my 99 red balloons. Something will change someday.

 _coda_

When they came for you, I did not speak; to speak would have been to acknowledge my complicity in your actions. When they told me I was close enough to the age of majority to not be reassigned, I did not show relief, to do so would have been to betray how much you meant to me. When they cleaned the house of you, I did not move an inch, for that would mean I had attached emotions to worldly things. When they left, I did not cry, for you taught me that crying was defeat. When the days passed, I did not think of your Ma and Mom, because to think of the old-world is treason.

364 days after taking you, the sky fills with red. And here is a red balloon.

I think of you and let it go.


End file.
